Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren’t for Jellyfin I would’ve just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.

Cat8 is pointless with gigabit equipment as far as speed goes. Cat6 will do 10gig, you just had bad cables.

Their terms require a phone so yes, on their terms. Why would they make an exception for anyone?

Their captive portal requires wifi and thats all that matters. And why would they want to deal with paper agreements for WiFi?

You don’t have to be a member to use WiFi, someone else could have given you the password if there even is one, so ya even if you did agree when signing up it would make sense to still require that.

I implement these kind of setups including a couple libraries and while I would have Ethernet ports available if within budget, I would not allow you to bypass captive portal, the agreement, or traffic filtering. I don’t care what you are doing but I am required to try not to allow easy access to questionable content. If someone is doing something illegal it’s gonna involve the library if you get caught (that’s why the phone number but maybe they are just being shitty with it). Not worth the risk. Also a lot of those decisions are made by a board so being upset with the staff won’t accomplish anything. Wifi is cheap, pulling cable can be very costly in comparison and depending on building type can be hard, damaging or, not feasible. Those ports could also be broken because people don’t respect shit, that could also be the reason for their reaction.

This is all I got for you, good luck but if you want your privacy you’re likely going to have to go somewhere else.

You can use it but on their terms. Your privacy doesnt mean anything to them, they are protecting themselves. Captive portal is likely making you agree to not abuse the service.

Also you’re choosing not to participate which is fair but they don’t need to support that.

Using the firewall to force dns because the services were stupid enough to rely on dns to determine location. You would use a (usually paid) dns service hosted out of the wherever the content you want was and get access to region locked stuff like the US netflix library from abroad. This worked because vpns were being detected and rokus dns was hard coded so assumed to be trusted.

I don’t know if this still works because I no longer own anything Roku and Netflix’s service hasn’t been worth that kind of shenanigans for a long time. It likely doesn’t work anymore.

Edit: Unblock-US used to be such a service

One reason used to be to switch to a different region for Netflix, etc but I’m not sure if that still works, I haven’t had to use a Roku in a long time.

If you sped through edge’s first launch wizard recently it’s now scraping your browsing data from other browsers.

I’m in Canada and none of the 3 ISPs I have available support ipv6 even on business connections.

You can probably guess the three and be wrong but also right, this is the case lots of places in Canada only less options.